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Global banking group Standard Chartered is to back the FT Business Book of the Year Award and the Bracken Prize for Young Authors for the next three years, in a new partnership.
The tie-up starts this year with Standard Chartered’s support for the 22nd edition of the prestigious £30,000 business book award, which was won last month by Stephen Witt for The Thinking Machine, his timely account of the rise of Nvidia and its chief executive, Jensen Huang.
Roula Khalaf, FT editor and chair of the award judging panel, said: “I’m delighted to welcome Standard Chartered as partner . . . and to announce the return of the Bracken Prize for Young Authors. Together, these prizes celebrate compelling ideas and those who offer timely perspectives on business today.”
Standard Chartered’s group chief financial officer, Diego De Giorgi, said the bank was “proud to support platforms that encourage deeper understanding of the trends that challenge assumptions, spark debate and define the future”.
The Bracken prize will go to the best business book proposal by a writer aged under 35. As the Bracken Bower Prize, it ran for nine years, starting in 2014. Many winners and finalists have gone on to transform their proposals into successful books.
Tanuj Kapilashrami, Standard Chartered’s chief strategy and talent officer, said the group looked forward to “celebrating the voices — both established and rising talent — who allow us to contribute to a richer and more diverse global conversation”.
Standard Chartered takes on the partnership from asset manager Schroders, which backed the book award from 2023 to 2025. Investment bank Goldman Sachs and consultancy McKinsey were previous backers of the award, which was first won by Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat in 2005.
Nikkei, owner of the Financial Times, will also provide backing for both prizes.
Submissions for both the business book award and the Bracken prize will open in spring 2026, with closing dates for entry on June 30 for the book award and September 25 for the Bracken prize. Winners of both awards will be named at a dinner in London at the end of this year. Runners-up of the book award receive £10,000 each.
Since 2005, publishers have entered more than 10,000 titles for the FT business book award and 323 have been longlisted. The award was praised in one 2022 study for its wide cultural impact and “the consistent quality of the longlisted books [which] has created a canon of books about business that has literary value”.
For more information about the book award, visit www.ft.com/bookaward. To learn more about the Bracken prize, go to www.ft.com/bracken.
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